Louisiana Nutria removal can be done professionally by several means. The most effective means of removal is by shooting the nutria. A pellet gun can be effective but in order for it to be quick and as “humane” as possible your going to want a head shot. We love nutria, but when it is necessary to remove large numbers fast this is the way to do it. Nutria cause severe damage to levee’s in Louisiana, and can damage critical retention ponds.

The second effective means is trapping. Trapping nutria can be done in itself by several means as there are several types of traps out there to trap and remove nutria. One trap is called the conibear. Conibear traps for nutria would be called the 220.

The 220 Nutria trap, can kill a nutria on the spot and quickly too! The downside is that these traps cannot tell the difference between a nutria and your cat or dog or worse your arm! This type of nutria trap must be set by a pro and all care must be taken to avoid non-target species. This is not to be taken lightly as it is a serious trap - one that your common emergency room has probably NOT seen before and will really hurt if it goes off on your arm.

The other type of nutria trap is the cage trap. Nutria are much stronger than they give themselves credit for and a cheap cage will do for them - for some reason they just do not bust out of the cages as a raccoon might. Nutria seem to be fairly angry to be in the trap but to me appear to be just grumpy. I do not know if all nutria are grumpy but it makes removal easy once they are trapped since they just sit there and await their demise with an ugly old grumpy face - poor fella, lol

I use a special lure and bait for nutria but sweet potatoes are always a good choice. I have made floating traps, and land sets for many a nutria. We have removed over 70 nutria from the pond located in New Orleans at the West End Marina. We have also trapped nutria along the Bayou St John levee system. We also have a Facebook page set up for that job and you can find it HERE. We sometimes blog about our adventures - if we have any nutria stories they will reside here.